I just don't understand some people. The airport has been here for 65 years, yet people move into houses and neighborhoods that are exactly in line with the runway, and they expect there to be no airplanes flying over. In the last couple of years, we've had to change the patterns and approaches so we would avoid flying over houses:
The red is the left pattern for runway 28, and to fly it, we take-off, and turn to a heading of 300 right away, then climb to 1900' (pattern alt) before turning cross-wind. Then, we have to cut our downwind short and turn base before we cross the main highway and fly over Middleton, which makes you roll out on final about ten seconds before touching down.
The blue is the left pattern for runway 10, and to fly it, we have to take off, and turn crosswind before crossing the highway again (~150-200 ft AGL depending on the day) to avoid flying over Middleton again. We also have to fly our final approach course on a heading of 150-160 so we avoid houses on the road at the end of the runway, which makes us line up with the runway a couple of seconds before touchdown.
The dark green line is the published VOR approach course, which has an MDA of 1540 ft, but during training, we were never able to fly it down to minimums to actually see what it was like. We would always have to level off at 1900 ft, and fly the light green path to avoid houses again.
All the areas inside the purple boxes are where the complaints are coming from.
It's ridiculous what we've had to do to satisfy these people, and even then they still complain all the time. People even go as far as to claim that pilots try to fly over their houses specifically while they're having dinner! There's no more traffic in Middleton than there is in countless other airports in similar situations around the country, but people here think they're special for some reason, and they should be able to dictate who does what. It's dangerous, and detrimental to the expansion of Middleton (the #1 place to live in the United States according to Money Magazine, who'd have thought?). I can understand why people say Dane county is "1200 square miles surrounded by reality". I just don't understand some people...
Sorry, done ranting for a while now...
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